LOS ANGELES – A light rail line that will have its eastern terminus within 1 mile of Monterey Park’s city border will open Nov. 15, county transportation officials announced Monday.

The Gold Line Eastside Extension will run from downtown Los Angeles to the intersection of Atlantic and Pomona boulevards, just south of the Pomona (60) Freeway. It will run about 6 miles and will have eight stops, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said.

But there are concerns about the line’s safety, with several community members and an MTA board member criticizing that aspect of the project.

“The community has expressed concerns about how unsafe it looks, and it appears they are going to ignore me and ignore the community,” said county Supervisor Gloria Molina, who let loose on transit officials at last Thursday’s MTA meeting, saying she didn’t trust them to make sure the line was safe.

Safety concerns stem from the long stretches of the line along streets that don’t have barriers to prevent pedestrians from crossing the tracks. The line runs through heavily populated neighborhoods where residents are very near to the tracks.

A group of them spoke at last week’s meeting about their concerns. Molina asked MTA officials to meet with the residents.

Dennis Mori, the project director for the Gold Line, said the agency anticipates scheduling a public meeting before the line opens to address the community’s concerns. He said the line has already started operating without passengers as a test; so far, there have been no problems.

“We’ve had no accidents, nobody getting injured,” said Mori. “We believe the line is safe.”

MTA officials have long been concerned about the potential for accidents along the new line: Since March, MTA employees have been stationed on the streets near the line warning people about jay-walking across the tracks, according to agency officials.

Police also have increased their presence, Mori said, issuing 1,300 citations since March to jaywalkers and motorists crossing rail intersections without stopping.

But the MTA board decided Thursday that enforcement will not be enough of a deterrent – it approved $4.5 million in new safety improvements, including a 4-foot fence to discourage jaywalking.

The fencing won’t be in place until next year, however, leaving the line to operate for several months without the barrier.

That left Molina questioning the MTA’s decision to open the line next month.

“I just don’t know what the urgency is,” she said.

Putting off the line’s opening would put the agency behind schedule, officials said. The MTA had preliminarily announced the line would open over the summer; the original deadline called for it to open by the end of this year. Putting it off any further could leave people questioning the delay, MTA officials said.

Above-ground lines that traverse through populated areas tend to have much higher accident rates. The Blue Line from downtown Los Angeles to Long Beach has several sections where pedestrians cross – and it has logged 96 fatalities since 1990, according to MTA officials, more than any rail line in the county by far.

The eastside extension is a much shorter line by comparison, but it is nearly all above-ground and runs mostly through populated neighborhoods.

That has left Molina wondering why the line was not built underground in the first place. Last Thursday, she brought it up again while discussing the Westside Subway extension, a project that will be completely underground.

“Why did the Westside get a subway and the Eastside didn’t?” Molina asked. “We’re supposed to wear our regional hats, but because some of us get short-changed we have to look out for our own back yards.”